13 January 2012

Or it’s a walk in the shopping centre but you’ll have to walk for longer! Walking has many benefits for our physical and mental health, especially walking outdoors and even more especially in the green outdoors. And if we’re substituting our walking for some of our car or bus travel we’ll be helping reduce carbon emissions as well. That’s all familiar stuff and we’ve pushed it here on Sustainable Scotland. Here I wish to talk about research which shows that walking actually leads to growth in the size of the brain and provides a cushion that protects from dementia.

These conclusions come from a study carried out by the University of Illinois. Researchers studied 120 volunteers aged 50 to 80 over a year. Half were assigned to start walking 40 minutes a day three times a week, while the others were told to do stretching and toning exercises. After 12 months brain scans showed the walking group had an average 2 per cent growth in the hippocampus – the brain’s memory centre. The stretching group’s hippocampuses shrank 1 per cent

Arthur Kramer, professor of psychology and neuroscience and co-author of the study, believes cardiovascular activity such as walking boosts blood flow to the brain, triggering new neurons to grow. Part of the reason that walking is so good for the brain is that makes us multitask – when we walk we integrate visual input, auditory input, often olfactory input, and input coming from joints and muscles. This grows brain cells and the linkages between them. Walking while using your mobile phone or listening to music is likely to be less beneficial.

If you want to know more about this study the best place is an interview on National Public Radio (USA) where Professor Kramer and a psychologist who is a specialist on ageing discuss the findings, the explanation and the implications. It’s fairly accessible – in addition to being fascinating and important – and you can either listen to the interview or read the transcript or, and this is the recommended option, you can do both at the same time!

If you are at all interested in this article you will also be interested in Keep Your Brain Alive, the title of which is fairly self-explantory, and also a good thing to do!

Seahorses
The plural of seahorse is seahorses not seahorsi, unlike the plural of hippocampus which can be hippocampuses or hippocampi. But what have seahorses got to do with it? Seahorses belong to the genus Hippocampus, which comes from the Greek for hippos for horse and kampos for sea monster. The hippocampus in our brains is so called because it is shaped like a seahorse.  

The Song of the Seahorse is sung by Miriam Stockley. Miriam was one of the backing singers when Katrina and the Waves won the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin in 1997, when Britain most unusually entered a decent song – Love Shine a Light – performed with by someone who wasn’t entirely lacking in talent. However Stockley is a lot more than a backing singer. Her distinctive vocalise style (singing without words) is featured on the Adiemus series of compositions by the prolific and popular moustachioed Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. Well worth listening to. However The Song of the Seahorse has words!

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